Karl Frenzel

Karl Frenzel (20 August 1911-2 September 1996) was an Oberscharfuhrer (Staff Sergeant) of the SS on Nazi Germany during World War II, and he was given command of the Lager I section of the Sobibor extermination camp and was responsible for slave labor at Sobibor.

Biography
Karl Frenzel was born on 20 August 1911 in Zehdenick, Berlin, Germany, and he was an apprenticed carpenter in his youth. Frenzel would later work as a butcher, but he struggled with unemployment and joined the Nazi Party due to Adolf Hitler's promise of jobs to unemployed Germans. Frenzel was appalled by the early persecution of Jews in Germany, having had a relationship with a Jewish girl until she broke up with him in 1931 after learning that he was a Nazi. Frenzel would join the SS paramilitary of Nazi Germany during World War II, and he was sent to command the Lager I section of the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, where he was responsible for managing the slave labor activities of the prisoners. Frenzel claimed that he was always responsible with punishments, but prisoners knew him as a cruel and brutal person. In 1943, after a breakout attempt, he announced that the failed escapees and every tenth member of the work units would be executed in reprisal. Frenzel burnt down the camp after the 14 October 1943 mass escape, and he was arrested in Munich at the end of the war, but he was released and worked as a state lighting technician after the war. On 22 March 1962, he was identified and arrested for his crimes against humanity, and on 20 December 1966 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1982, he was released on technicality, and he renounced his beliefs in Nazism and cursed the Nazis after the war, refraining from entering politics. He died in 1996 at Garbsen, Lower Saxony, Germany.